Issie stood and was mouthing the question “Is this the fourth grade?” Lawton’s teacher, who was sitting off to the side opposite the doorway, waved her in. Issie wore an outfit similar to the one Eliza had seen her in at Peter Marshall’s gallery. Her bracelets jangled as she darted to the empty seat in the middle of the front row. Colorful feathers dangled from each ear.
All that Eliza could hear was the whispering of the children seated behind Lawton. Lawton repeated his last recited line, “And when responding to the cheers he lightly doffed his hat three times.” But he could not find a way forward. He was lost. Eliza looked for Lawton’s teacher. She did not have a copy of his poem and could not help him with a prompt. After his third try of failing to remember the next line, his teacher finally spoke, “Lawton if you need to take a break, we can go on to the next student, and you can come back later.” Lawton shook his head, and he brushed the tears from his face as if swatting mosquitoes. He started to repeat the line a fourth time. Eliza caught his attention as she moved her chair close to the front row. She silently said the next two lines with him. “‘No stranger in the crowd could doubt ’twas Casey at the bat. Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt.’” Together they moved forward. Tears were rolling fast down Lawton’s cheeks, but he did not take his eyes off Eliza as he stumbled across the seven remaining stanzas. When he finished, the audience clapped and the tension, that had held the room still, disintegrated into relief. Lawton sat back down in the middle row, and Eliza could see his shoulders moving up and down with uneven breaths. He wiped his face several times with the back of his jacket sleeve.
Issie stayed for Sam to recite his poem and when the next student was shuffling through the row of seats, she darted out of the room. Eliza stayed for the entire recital. She couldn’t leave without saying something to Lawton. When it was over, she went up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “You got rattled, but you did a great job recovering. You picked a hard poem.” He shrugged and shook his head. She wanted to put her arms around him, but she knew that would only make things worse. She patted him on his back and smiled at his teacher, who gave her a look of sympathy.
Outside the school, Eliza walked past a small group of mothers who had stopped to chat. She was relieved she did not know any of them. She was almost an hour late for her appointment at the Gibbes. She checked her watch again, as if by looking a second time, she would regain minutes. Lawton had practiced so hard. She hated seeing him so upset, and yet there was nothing more she could do. Eliza wished she could bring him to Henry, but Henry was far away. How did Issie even know about the recital today? Had Henry told her? Eliza doubted that. He wouldn’t have asked her to come if he had known that Issie was planning to attend. As she walked north on Archdale, past the Unitarian Church, she checked that she had everything she needed in her satchel. She turned east on Clifford where she had chained her bicycle to the wrought-iron fence of St. John’s. And then it became clear how the morning had assembled itself. If Lawton had been practicing his lines on the afternoons that Issie had walked him home from school, she could have learned about the recital. And Lawton may have been vague about the time of the recital so that Issie would be sure to miss it. In fact, it was certainly possible that Lawton had, on purpose, told her the wrong time. Eliza was lining up the numbers on her bicycle lock when she heard her name called. Across the street a woman got out of a dark blue coupe. It was Issie.
“Eliza,” Issie called again.
Eliza straightened her back. Issie ran quickly across the street and then slowed down as she came nearer.
“I just wanted to thank you for what you did in there.” Issie crossed her arms and gripped her elbows to keep her hands from shaking.
Eliza shook her head. This was not what she expected Issie to say. “I didn’t do anything, I wish I could have. He just got rattled. His poem was probably too long.”
“No, you got him through, you got him through it. He looked at you. I saw how he looked at you. I didn’t mean to come late. He told me the recital was at eleven, so I thought I would come early to find a place in the back. And instead I get there forty-five minutes after it’s started.” Issie rubbed the inside of her left wrist. Eliza noticed a small tattoo in the shape of a delicate feather.
“It’s not a big deal. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Eliza placed her satchel in her bicycle basket.
“Eliza, please. I’m trying to thank you. I know you hate me but . . .”
“I don’t.”
“Eliza, you must.”
“No. I don’t. What happened was between me and Henry.” Eliza wrapped her bicycle chain around the seat and closed the lock. She looked back up at Issie. “But I don’t think we have anything to say to each other.”
Issie took a step forward. “Everyone in that room knows I’m the reason Lawton got upset. It’s hard to come back here and feel as if everyone, but especially your own son, doesn’t want you around.”
“Your relationship with Lawton has nothing to do with me. I have to go, I’m late for a meeting.” Eliza wanted no part in any conversation with Issie, especially one about Lawton.
“It has everything to do with you.”
“What are you talking about?” Eliza felt as if she had just walked into a brick wall.
“You’re making it difficult for me to get close to my son.”
“Issie, I just helped Lawton pick out a poem. That’s all.”
“But he wanted you to come, not me.”
“That’s not my fault. But you just can’t show up after all this time and expect him to act as if he has known you all his life, you can’t expect him to open his arms wide for a mother who didn’t want him.”
“That’s not the way it was, that’s not fair.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re right. It’s not fair. But nothing about any of this is fair. Lawton is trying to come to grips with everything—but he’s only nine years old. I guess what I am trying to say is you can’t force it—the it—whatever the it is—has got to come from him.”
Eliza started to get on her bicycle, but she felt off balance. If Issie said anything back to her, she did not hear it. She walked her bicycle down the street, wishing she could run and not stop until she had worn out everything inside of her body. She didn’t dare look behind her. It was hard enough to avoid the jagged edges of the past without Issie creating more.
Eliza had known that sooner or later she would come in contact with Issie, and she had practiced the range of possibilities—from acting as if nothing had happened to acting as if everything had happened. And she always thought she would be somewhere in between the two extremes. She had not realized she was going to say what she did until she heard her words. How could anyone allow themselves to break a child’s heart?
When Eliza arrived at the Gibbes, Helen was waiting for her. “Helen, I’m so sorry I’m late.”
“Don’t worry, I have to run out, but I’ll check in when I get back. We’ve put them—all ten—in the conference room on the second floor. They’re magnificent. I think you’ll be very pleased. Oh, and we have arranged for a photographer to come at two.”
As Eliza climbed the stairs, she realized that Issie was not the person she had conjured up in her mind all those years. The woman who had stood in front of her on the street was no longer the reckless beauty who could take anything she wanted with no regard for the consequences. She was still beautiful, but there was something broken and desperate about her. Was it possible that what had happened between Issie and Henry had damaged Issie more than anyone? Eliza thought back to all of the conversations she and Henry had had where he told her how irrational Issie was being, but maybe it was Issie’s own way of fighting back to a place she had once belonged. Here she was, in her early thirties, feeling miserable that her son did not want her around. What had happened—not being wanted by Henry and being sent away by her family—had broken Issie up. Henry had been right when he had said she was fragile.
Even so, Issie had thanked her for what she had done for Lawton. But when Eliza had tried to resist getting pulled into an emotional conversation, Issie had lashed out. Eliza had felt Issie’s desperation, but she had also felt something else. She didn’t know if it were courage or selfishness or some strange combination of the two.
Ten pots were assembled in the boardroom—two from the Gibbes, three from the Charleston Museum, two from the State Museum, and three from private collectors. The pots had been made to store oils and grains and meats and were thick and sturdy with wide rolled mouths and ear-shaped handles. With the exception of one, they were all over twenty inches tall with wide circumferences and glazes in variations of olive green, oatmeal beige, and brown. Despite or perhaps because of their utilitarian purpose, there was a beauty in their strength and singularity. Eliza sat down in one of the chairs to collect herself. She had seen assembled works of artists many times before, but she had never felt such a need to be quiet. The making of these massive storage pots would have required a substantial physical power, but now these pots were all that was left. She was reminded of an American poet’s description of Morandi’s late drawings as being, in their “wonder and singularity, lifelines to the unseen.” She closed her eyes and ran her hand over the cursive writing incised on the neck of the pots before they were glazed. The edges of the clay had been pushed up and in some cases had not been smoothed down and had the roughness of a scar. This was what was left of a life, she thought. Sturdy pots that had been made for service and yet the maker had also made them beautiful.
Maybe Jamie had been partly right—there was no point in looking for what once was or might have been because you would never be able to find it. It only made sense to look for what was lost if you were prepared to find something unexpected. Maybe that was what she had been trying to say to Issie. She shouldn’t come back looking for and expecting to find a son. Any possibility of that had disappeared when she had left nine years ago.
Of the ten assembled pots, only two were dated before 1840, the remaining eight dated from the period that began in 1857. Eliza considered the research she had done. After Captain Stoney had donated the pot to the Charleston Museum, its director had traveled in 1930 to Edgefield to interview its residents about Dave. In one of the transcripts, an elderly former slave remembered Dave. “He used to belong to old man Drake . . . and it was at that time that he had his leg cut off. They say he got drunk and layed on the railroad track.” Eliza could find no other reference to Dave having lost his leg.
In another document detailing Harvey Drake’s property in 1830, Dave was listed along with another slave, Lydia, and her children. A few years later Harvey Drake died, and his estate was settled. On the sale inventory was listed, “1 Negro Woman Lydia and two children sold to L. Drake for $600.00” and “1 Negro man named Dave to Drake and Gibbs for $400.00.” As part of the westward expansion, Lydia’s owner moved to Louisiana and took her and her children with them. Dave’s owner also moved westward, but Dave remained in Edgefield, where he changed owners several more times. The accounts Eliza read asserted that the reason Dave did not travel westward with his owner was because he was too valuable as a potter in Edgefield. Most scholars assumed Lydia was Dave’s wife. Eliza could find no documentation to support these assumptions, but it did provide a romantic and poignant story.
In 1858 Dave wrote, “I wonder where is all my relations, friendship to all and every nation.” His next known pot was inscribed, “Making this verse: I had all thoughts, lads and gentleman never out walks.” And six months later, “The sun, the moon and—the stars. In the west there are plenty of bears.” Eliza looked at these three pots next to one another. The lines did suggest a narrative that was plausible—about Dave’s missing family and certainly his thoughts about the West—but unless she uncovered more evidence, it was not robust enough for her to write about. One conflicting piece of newly discovered information could shatter any such fragilely constructed theory.
Eliza moved on to the remaining pots. The next four were massive, too. The lines all related to verses from Acts and Revelations. On the last pot Dave was known to have made, he wrote, “I made this jar all of cross, If you don’t repent you will be lost.” It was dated 1864 and was smaller than the others, a clue that perhaps he was getting weaker with age. The large pots required skill and a physicality he may no longer have possessed.
Eliza ran her hands over the smooth glazed surfaces of each pot, as if to discover a sense of resilience and offer of consolation. So many people were broken by life—not by what they did, but by what others did to them. And yet they carried on. Dave’s sense of humanity had survived in the lines that he had written. Eliza understood why Lawton was acting the way he was. He was protecting himself. He was suspicious that Issie would disappear again. Maybe the right thing for Lawton was for Issie to stay. Was Eliza tempting Fate to even think that? She wanted the world to settle down and be calm for him. She knew what was better for her, but what was better for Lawton?
For the next hour, Eliza carefully examined the pots and made extensive notes on each one. She hadn’t given up on Cleve’s bowl. The color and texture of its glaze and the shape of its rim were similar enough to the pots to warrant a side-by-side comparison. As she was jotting down a thought to herself about possibly including the last lines of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Planet on the Table”—lines about something bearing some lineament or character of the planet of which they were part—as an epigraph for the monograph on Dave, Helen stuck her head in the conference room. “I’m back. They’re amazing, aren’t they? I just wanted to check with you how you were getting along. You’ll be pleased to know that I saved you from Peter Marshall. He has a pot—I think it’s the one that has been for sale for ages in the paper. He was very excited to hear that you were working on a monograph on Dave. He wanted you to come by and authenticate his pot. I think he already has the Mortons lined up for it. The glaze and rim gave it away—it wasn’t even close. I’m not even sure it’s Edgefield. Oh, and the private collectors of these pieces,” she said, referring to the pots assembled in the room, “have agreed to your including photographs of their pots, our lawyer is reviewing the permission forms you will need to send to them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LAWTON SAID IT DIDN’T GO SO WELL,” HENRY SAID WHEN he called her that evening.
“Oh God, Henry, it was painful. In the middle of his poem, Issie rushed in and sat down in the front row, and Lawton got rattled. He couldn’t remember his lines. He tried to hold everything together, but he couldn’t. He managed to finish his poem, but when he sat down, he was very upset.”
“Issie was there? Lawton didn’t tell me that. He seemed disappointed he didn’t make it into the next round, but he seemed okay. How did Issie even know about it?”
“Issie said Lawton told her, but he told her it started at eleven not ten.”
“I doubt that, he said he could only invite one person, and he wanted you to come.”
“Maybe she learned about it when she walked him home from school, when he was memorizing his lines. Issie left soon after Lawton finished, and then when I left, she was waiting outside, she wanted to speak to me.”
“Outside the school?”
“Yes, on Chisolm Street by St. John’s.”
“What did she want?”
“She began by thanking me for helping Lawton through his poem. I was sitting in the back row, and when he lost his place, I moved to the front and started silently saying the words with him.”
“Is that all she had to say?”
“No, she was upset that Lawton didn’t want her around.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I told her that it had nothing to do with me, that I only helped him with a poem, and then she became agitated and said it had everything to do with me, that I was the one making it difficult for her to get close to Lawton. It felt like the conversation could explode at any second. I told her I had to go and didn’t
really give her a chance to say anything else. But then later when I was looking at the Dave pieces, I began thinking she was hoping I would tell her that she should stay. And maybe I should have. She has just lost her father, and even if they didn’t have a good relationship, maybe that makes it worse. And she comes back here to see her son who doesn’t want to see her, and you don’t want to see her, and she has to spend her time going through her grandmother’s property in order to sell it. She’s pretty alone.”
“You shouldn’t think that. She’s emotionally very erratic, and she does what she wants. She feels things acutely when it comes to herself, but she’s reckless with everyone else. The sooner she leaves the better—really. Lawton doesn’t need her in his life. She will twist his heart in ways you or I could not imagine. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I guess something like this was bound to happen. My guess is she will calm down, and everything will go back to the way it was. I still think she’ll split at some point but probably not for a while.”
Eliza wanted to ask Henry if Issie had always had a small feather tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, but she didn’t. Instead she asked, “How are things going there?”
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